It’s easy as a recent graduate (or as a professional of any age) to be proud of the money you earn and to desire to be self-sufficient. While the Bible does count it as a virtue to be able to provide for one’s own household (1 Timothy 5:8, 2 Thessalonians 3:10), we must remember that all finances and possessions ultimately belong to the Lord. John Scroggins, executive director of Baton Exchange, said in a Baton Exchange training video that "a steward is someone entrusted with another's wealth or property in charge of the responsibility of managing it in the owner's best interest." He gave 7 principles for considering stewardship.

The Baton Exchange Leader Incubator recently finished a retreat on adversity and God’s development process for leaders.God’s development process involves using trials, pain and isolation to develop leaders. Trials test our character, and pain and isolation can humble us into a deeper dependence on God.

The title isn’t meant to be misleading because I don’t think these two things actually go against each other at all. They both come from God after all. However, for the limited human mind, it can be difficult and confusing to hold different commands in our minds at the same time.

When people think of culture and cultural competency in the workforce, they usually think of relating to those from other ethnic backgrounds. While this is important in a global workforce, businesses themselves have cultures too.Culture is any given group’s set of values, beliefs and assumptions which affect how they behave.

My transition to the working world post-college doesn't feel like much of a transition anymore. After a year of working and establishing a fairly stable routine, life seems much more like a slow growth in trust.

College is life-encompassing: friends, routines, and memories are all stored in a college town somewhere. Once graduates leave their campuses, they may have trouble finding community. Kyle Young, pastor of Rock City Church, said in a Baton Exchange training video that college life is more intimate and fertile for relationship-building than post-college life. Finding community is just one challenge of the campus-to-career transition.

As the Baton Exchange’s workplace training video on how to bring about justice in your city explains, justice is not just about the way we distribute things but also the right way to value things. Here’s where justice becomes so tricky. Values are always based on beliefs about the purpose of life, human nature and what is right and wrong but across our culture, people form very different values based on an array of beliefs.

The question haunts humanity and we often seek to define our purpose by what we do, as Bob Robinson points out in “Your Identity Doesn’t Come From Your Work.” Although humans are made to work as part of our nature, it isn’t our identity. It can’t be how we define ourselves.

Recently I completed an audit of the company blog that I maintain and from a content marketing viewpoint, I learned quite a bit (which is after all the point of completing the audit). Whether this means much to you or not, I got insights on:

• Which blog topics perform better on social media

• How Google reads headers and text in the blogs

• The importance of keywords and questions

• The importance of tagging photos in blogs

• What CTAs move people to action more frequently

• Which authors consistently perform well

Some of these insights confirmed assumptions I already had, but more importantly, some of these insights totally defied assumptions I had, and some of those assumptions were honestly prideful.